It all started out fairly harmless. You were about to meet some friends for brunch, but before you left, you needed to look up the restaurant’s address. You flipped open the laptop screen, and there it was, staring right at you: your significant other’s inbox. Maybe you closed the window and went about your day. Or maybe, if you’re like most people, you found yourself clicking on just one email, and before you knew it, you were down a deep, dark rabbit hole of snooping.

“Everyone does it,” said a coworker of mine, after I informally polled the office on their snooping habits last week. The conversation that followed was one of the liveliest we’ve had, with almost everyone sharing a personal anecdote or the story of “a friend” who at one point or another snooped during a relationship. We’re not alone. According to a survey conducted last year by antivirus software company Avast, one in five men and one in four women admitted to checking their significant other’s smartphone. Meanwhile, a 2013 poll by McAfee found that 49 percent of people regularly go through their partner’s emails. In these times, when Instagram and Facebook stalking is considered fair game, has email snooping become the norm as well?

For one couple, reading each other’s emails is part of an unspoken agreement between the two. “He gave me his password, which he uses for everything,” she shared. “I’m sure he knows I check his things every once in a while, and I’m positive he’s going into my accounts too.” Another editor confessed to snooping, not because she was suspicious of her spouse, but because it was her way of understanding him better. “He doesn’t talk to me about a lot of issues that he’s going through. I read some of his emails to understand what’s happening. It’s altruistic snooping.”

A portion of our staff was decidedly anti-snooping, and many in this contingent believed that even if you trust your significant other, if you’re actively looking, you’re bound to find something. “My sister saw an email with a photo she thought was of her boyfriend’s nephew, so she clicked on it, but it turned out it was of her engagement ring,” one writer shared. “The worst part of it all was that she hated it.” Her sister never brought up what she saw, and for months, whenever the two went out to dinner or on a weekend getaway, she mistakenly kept thinking he was about to pop the question. (After eight months, he finally did, and thankfully, with a different ring.) Another one of our editors similarly found out about her boyfriend’s impending proposal plans through his email, but in her case, keeping quiet was impossible. “I ended up confessing about it in the middle of a huge fight,” she said. “I just felt so awkward and uncomfortable and decided it was best to be honest.”

While discovering upcoming engagement plans is inopportune, stumbling across something upsetting is, of course, a far worse scenario. A friend of one of our beauty editors discovered her boyfriend had sent a mean-spirited email about her to one of his friends. She constantly weighed bringing it up, but decided against it. “I basically reminded her that if he were to go through her inbox, there would be plenty of unkind emails and Gchat conversations about him in there as well,” she said.

As for the actual art of snooping, I learned that there are several more ways to keep tabs on someone other than just checking their email. “Most iPads and iPhones are all connected, so it’s easy to see someone’s text messages if you just ask to borrow their iPad,” one assistant pointed out. Another young staffer gave us all a tutorial on how to stealthily use a phone’s location services feature to confirm whether or not a person is being honest about their whereabouts. For the greater good of all relationships out there, I will not be sharing that information here.

Those who have been on the other side of the equation—the snoopees, if you will—have become well-versed on how to stave off wandering eyes. The basic rules are as follows: Do not sync your devices; remove message previews from your phone settings; don’t use the same password for different services; and never, ever forget to log out of your accounts. But by the end of our roundtable discussion, we all cynically agreed that, regardless of the measures you take, there’s always someone out there looking at your emails. “I never put anything important in writing,” said one fashion editor as a matter of fact—a lesson that perhaps many of us should follow after the Sony leaks. “Everything that is on the Internet isn’t private,” added another. “Either your significant other or the North Korean hackers are already reading it.”